If you want to reduce weight, then lower your caloric intake. You don’t even need to workout. Just measure your calories and keep decreasing them until the weight falls off.
If you want to add in exercise, that’s great too, and then you can eat more calories. But if you studiously count calories and reduce them, you will lose weight - it’s guaranteed.
If I put you on a desert island and starved you, you would lose weight. It’s the same principle. Trying to imagine that there is a mystery here to explain weight gain is a coping mechanism. There is no mystery.
It's not a mystery, but it also sort of pretends that humans are robots. That is, the human body has developed homeostatic mechanisms over billions of years, and a big part of that is that if your body thinks it's starving, it will try its hardest to (a) make you hungry so that you will do whatever you can to eat more, and (b) slow your metabolic rate so you don't die.
Yes you will be hungry but we are sentient beings who can ignore the urge to eat, just as we can control other base urges. You don’t see an attractive person and assault them, or someone with a desirable object and immediately steal from them. It’s called self control.
Agree with this. It's such a strange mindset to me.
I don't like getting up in the morning and going to work. I don't like selling things I no longer use. I don't like economising at the supermarket, and although I enjoy cooking sometimes, doing it all of the time just to survive gets quite tiresome. Etc.
Yet we just have to do those things, because we need money, we need to eat, etc.
Part of being a mature, successful adult is doing things that you might not immediately want to do.
This website is such a fascinating place. Some of the most hyper logical and driven technologists on earth, who then wrap themselves in knots to explain away their lack of physical fitness, when the obvious solution is staring them in the face. People can’t bring themselves to hear the truth
The most productive way to lose weight is to cut out the soda, juice, cookies, ice cream, donuts, Captain Crunch, pie, cake, candy bars, pastries, etc.
That's very true, but if you have healthy hormone levels and so long as your body fat percentage is high, you will lose way more fat than muscle, even without exercise. In bariatric surgery patients, for example >70% of weight loss is fat on average, and for 2/3rds of patients in some study there is less than 15% loss in fat-free mass.
On the other hand, if you're a man, then going to a reasonable body fat percentage is likely to make it easier for you to gain muscle.
So, as long as you make sure to eat a lot of protein, unless you have a large caloric deficit, you can expect muscle loss to be minimal (studies show that for extended moderate caloric deficits, muscle protein synthesis doesn't really decrease)
So yes, but if you're overweight, it's still a very good change on the balance, and you'll be way more fit in the end even if you do lose a bit of muscle.
Mostly bullshit as fat is the primary source for energy in the body and hard to earn protein are not. It's a myth mostly, do fast, do exercise, you will not lose muscle.
Fat is only the primary energy source at lower output levels. As power output increases, metabolism shifts increasingly away from fat and towards glycogen. The shape of that curve is different for everyone, but ironically the people who most need to lose fat typically have the least ability to metabolize fat (not fat adapted) and so with any exercise they're mostly running on carbs. Once the glycogen stores run low then their bodies start burning protein as well, even though it's less efficient.
Muscles will also just atrophy if not used, regardless of diet.
If you want to add in exercise, that’s great too, and then you can eat more calories. But if you studiously count calories and reduce them, you will lose weight - it’s guaranteed.
If I put you on a desert island and starved you, you would lose weight. It’s the same principle. Trying to imagine that there is a mystery here to explain weight gain is a coping mechanism. There is no mystery.